Ljova and the Kontraband

Ljova is the nom de compositeur of Moscow-born (in 1978) Lev Zhurbin, a Juilliard-trained violist who has turned his musical gifts in many directions, including arrangements for groups such as Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and the Kronos Quartet, and original compositions for a host of media, including film, TV, and the concert stage. He also has his own group, Ljova and the Kontraband. This new CD, the third produced by Ljova’s company Kapustnik, includes a grand total of twenty-four tracks of brief cues divided into two groupings. Most of the music is for the cinema (“kinó” in Russian means “cinema”). In the the first grouping, the majority of the tracks, most of which are genre pieces—polkas, waltzes, marches—were composed for a film entitled Black Lamb (Chernyi Baran), unreleased so far in America, directed by Roman Khrushch, described as “a dark comedy about race relations in contemporary Moscow.” Even though folk-inspired, each of the mostly brief cues here features little twists and turns in the music that continually keep the listener involved. At times one imagines that something along the lines of Nino Rota is going to emerge; at other times, such as in the two cues entitled “Karnavale,” there is more than a hint of Kurt Weill. Yet nothing here smacks of pastiche. Listeners who want to get an idea of how Ljova’s music works cinematically can access a montage of scenes from Black Lamb on the Kapustnik Website accompanied by the “War Then Peace” cue from the CD. The expert and enthusiastic performances come from Ljova on the viola, fiddle, and, yes, famiola (a hybrid six-string instrument combining violin, viola and cello), members of the New York based Gypsy band Romashka, and, for the final cue, “Pickle Porker Polka,” which is for a different film, the group Tall Tall Trees.

The second part of this CD presents an entirely—well, not quite entirely—different, and for the most part definitely darker, side of Ljova’s gifts as a composer and performer. The first cue, “Satul Dintre Noi” (Middle Village), is basically a modal dance mostly for cymbalom and bass that the film’s principal composer, Osvaldo Golijov, asked Ljova to compose for the scenes in which the main character gets moved from one hideout to another in Francis Ford Coppola’s sadly neglected Youth Without Youth. The next cue, the longest and probably my favorite on the CD, is entitled “The Coup.” One of the composers to whom Ljova dedicates Lost in Kino is Philip Glass, and there is certainly more than a hint of Glass in the virtuosic, nonstop, and extremely fast-paced perpetuum mobile exhilaratingly performed on the viola by Ljova who, thanks to multitracking, also introduces some extremely moody lyricism and a bass line into this thoroughly engrossing vignette. Although “The Coup” was finally not used in the film, Kapustnik.com offers a video clip, accompanied by “The Coup,” that may or may not be from the intended film, showing often barely visible cross-dressers walking about the streets at night.

Of the remaining numbers on Lost in Kino, I found “Russian Winterland,” which includes some slightly Indian-sounding vocalizing by Ljova’s wife, Inna Barmash, to be the most immediately identifiable as Russian in its mournful lyricism. Interestingly, this music was not written for a film but has been reused quite movingly to back images from a 1909 documentary entitled Moscow in the Snow, which can be found on Kapustnik’s Website and on YouTube. This is an absolute must. Russian in a very different way—one thinks of a composer such as Dmitri Shostakovich—are the wit and irony in the herky-jerky “Famous People,” the first of three cues that appear in Joseph Astor’s documentary Lost Bohemia, which depicts the last days of the Carnegie Hall Studios and of the apartments above them. The final of these three cues, “The Evictions Begin,” to my ears evokes the kind of tragic loneliness one often hears in the music of Arvo Pärt. Just as your ears begin to get used to the darkness, however, Lost in Kino concludes with a brief cue, “Doctor Wrong,” which, performed on a pipa and shakuhachi, seems to come from an entirely different ethnic world. This is followed by a rather silly, and again brief, song, entitled “The End (Baby You Gotta Get Up!”), for an animated film, with Sarah Natochenny singing the lyrics with what I’m guessing is an appropriately little-girly voice.

Ljova is not only a gifted composer and performer, he is an amazingly multifaceted musician whose passion and enthusiasm bubble over in the various pieces on this CD. It would be fun to see what he could come up with over an entire feature film. I also must put in a good word for the very present recorded sound on this Kapustnik release, which adds just enough reverberation to create a lovely sense of space around the music. Strongly recommended.



Royal S. Brown is a professor in the City University of New York. He is the author of three books, along with numerous articles and reviews. He is currently preparing a book of film theory entitled Images of Images: Lacan in Literature and Film.
- Royal S. Brown, Cineaste Magazine

Lev Zhurbin, violist and violinist; Romashka; Tall Trees, other performers. Kapustnik Records 003; CD.

THE violist Lev Zhurbin, who goes by the name Ljova, was fascinated by film and film music as a child. Lately he has become a prolific soundtrack composer, an occupation that appears to dovetail nicely with his interests as a performer of both classical and East European folk music. “Lost in Kino” brings together two dozen selections from film scores he composed or arranged, mostly for young, independent directors (Francis Ford Coppola being an exception) from 2005 to 2011.

Mr. Zhurbin has split the disc, conceptually at least, into two sections, labeled Side A and Side B, like an old LP. Side A is devoted to folk-tinged pieces he contributed to films by Sean Gannet and Roman Khrushch, most notably Mr. Khrushch’s “Black Lamb,” a Russian comedy about race relations in Moscow. He is backed by Romashka, which he describes as a Gypsy band but which draws on an array of influences, including Russian and Ukrainian music, klezmer, jazz and antique American pop styles.

Some of the “Black Lamb” score has an undercurrent of Kurt Weill’s early cabaret sound, and the short “War Then Peace” displays almost global inclusiveness. Along with touches of both the vibrant and melancholy strains of klezmer, you hear a hint of more generalized carnival music and what sounds like a Sicilian torch song.

The second part of the disc is devoted to darkly meditative works in a more classical idiom, most played by Mr. Zhurbin, overdubbed to sound like an ensemble of violists (with pizzicato figures standing in as subtle percussion). The most beautiful and moving of these are moody, sometimes tense pieces from “Lost Bohemia,” Josef Astor’s documentary about the evictions of artists from the Carnegie Hall Studios, which were demolished last summer. ALLAN KOZINN - Allan Kozinn, New York Times

Lev Zhurbin, the violist, composer and arranger who performs and writes under the name Ljova, almost always has a lot of projects before him. If he isn’t writing for, or recording with, his folk-classical ensemble, Ljova and the Kontraband, or performing in Romashka, a Gypsy band led by his wife, the singer Inna Barmash, he is working on film scores or transcriptions. (He has arranged Indian and Sephardic pieces for the Kronos Quartet; Asian and Eastern European works for Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project; Schubert and Shostakovich compositions for the Knights, a chamber orchestra). But even by Ljova’s standards, the coming week is unusually packed.

As part of the Silk Road Project’s residency at the American Museum of Natural History, Ljova and the Kontraband are playing three short sets on Sunday afternoon. On Tuesday evening Ljova (pronounced Ly-OH-va) joins Romashka for a rooftop performance at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, where Roman Khrushch’s new Russian-language film, “Black Lamb,” with a score by Ljova, will also be shown. And on Thursday the Kontraband offers a free evening in the recently remodeled David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, which will include a screening of “Cupcake,” a humorous film by Sean McPhillips, also with a score by Ljova.

Then, next Saturday afternoon, Ljova and the guitarist Clifton Hyde will perform a new score for a D. W. Griffith silent film, “The Girl and Her Trust,” at the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in Brooklyn. And as soon as the film ends, Ljova plans to grab his viola and hightail it to the Bronx, to play at a wedding with his new, unnamed string quartet. (“We’re fighting about it,” he said of the naming project.)

Weddings have assumed an unusually large place in Ljova’s professional life. A picture of Romashka performing at the wedding of Miranda Brooks, a landscape designer, and Bastien Halard, an architect, was published in the August issue of Vogue. And he traces almost everything he does now — film scoring and arranging, in particular — to the 10 years he spent, reluctantly at first, as the violist in Empyreal Strings, a quartet (sometimes augmented with harp and other instruments) that played in two to four weddings most weekends.

As it happens, Ljova and Ms. Barmash, who also sings in the Kontraband, are celebrating their third anniversary on Thursday, the day of the atrium concert.

“When I mentioned that to the people at Lincoln Center,” Ljova said in a recent interview in the restaurant in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall, “they said: ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Shouldn’t you celebrate?’ But I told them, ‘This is how we celebrate.’ The day before our wedding, we played a show at Joe’s Pub, and it was partly a wedding dance, with a lot of our friends, and partly a regular concert, with lots of people we didn’t know. And it was tons of fun. Musicians in Russia celebrate this way.”

Though 20 years of living in New York have flattened his accent, Ljova was born in Moscow in 1978. (He turns 32 on Aug. 18.) His father, Alexander Zhurbin, a prolific composer best known outside Russia for his 1975 rock opera, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and his mother, Irina Ginzburg, a writer and poet, moved to New York in 1990, partly because they found the post-Soviet economy too volatile but also because anti-Semitic demonstrations left them feeling insecure. (Now both father and son return to Russia several times a year, and a festival of Alexander Zhurbin’s music is scheduled in Moscow in December, in honor of his 65th birthday.)

At first, Ljova was determined to pursue a straightforward career as a violist. As a student at Juilliard, he played in several orchestras and chamber groups, including Kristian Jarvi’s Absolute Ensemble, which in 1996 devoted a full program to Alexander Zhurbin’s music. But he was also influenced by an uncle, Yuri Gandelsman, who had been the principal violist of the Moscow Virtuosi and the Israel Philharmonic and refused to dabble in pop, musical theater or anything outside the purely classical music world.

“I wanted to be like him,” Ljova said, “a very serious viola player. And when I got into Juilliard, I thought that I would eventually get a job with the New York Philharmonic, and I could complete the trifecta of going to LaGuardia High School, Juilliard and then landing across the street at Avery Fisher Hall, so that I would spend my entire life on 65th Street.”

Then he got a call to substitute at a wedding. He knew his purist uncle would turn down the job, and he did too, at first. But the contractor called again, and he agreed, partly because the money was good and partly out of curiosity.

“It was interesting,” he said, “because it was the first time I played somewhere where people were not necessarily listening attentively. And we were using handwritten arrangements, where some of the notes felt wrong. So I did it and said goodbye. But a few weeks later, they called again, and I said no again, but in the end I played. And after that, they said: ‘Look, what’s not to like? This pays better than your community orchestra jobs. The food isn’t bad. Be reasonable.’ So I thought, I didn’t really need the money, but it was very useful for buying CDs. And this was a quartet of Russian émigrés, 10, 20, 30 years older than I was, and I thought, ‘Maybe I can learn something from this.’ ”

What he learned was how to arrange, improvise and compose.

“At first,” he said, “when there were wrong notes in the parts, I corrected them. Then I began changing them to see what other possibilities worked. Then I began writing parts that suited the personalities in the group, and from there I began improvising and learning how to play by ear.

“There were good days and bad days, but this definitely gave me a platform to try new things. I was always a viola hooligan. I almost got kicked out of music camps for doing things in chamber music class that are now called ‘extended techniques’ but were then just known as fooling around. So with my arranging, I had the freedom to fail, because people were not listening so intently that you couldn’t take chances. And that emboldened me to try new things and to compose in a less serious, less academic way.

“And all that happened because I started playing weddings.”

Ljova’s reputation as an arranger has since gotten him commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the Silk Road Project, Brooklyn Rider, the Dallas Opera and other ensembles. He also began recording his own works. For his atmospheric debut disc in 2006, “Vjola: World on Four Strings,” he multitracked viola parts, bringing in an accordionist for just one track. It occurred to him only after the fact that if he were to promote the album the usual way, performing the music live, he would need a band. So Ljova and the Kontraband was born. The group made its own first disc, “Mnemosyne,” in 2008. (Both discs are on Ljova’s own Kapustnik label.)

The recordings became useful calling cards. A copy of “Mnemosnye” that made its way to Mikhail Baryshnikov was passed along to the choreographer Aszure Barton, who said in an e-mail that she “fell in love with his music instantly upon hearing it.” She has based several works on his pieces, including “Busk,” a collaboration that will be performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in December.

Ljova, meanwhile, has been thinking a lot about getting back to his roots.

“I would like to do more classical playing again,” he said. “I’m still hoping to learn the Janacek string quartets and play them in a concert someday. And the Bartok quartets. This is music that is easy enough to play but so difficult to make it feel improvised and balanced at the same time. And one day I’d like to play Elliott Carter’s quartets. Because to me, they sound like jazz. So I’m starting to find my way toward playing the Carter quartets with musicians who improvise. One day, one day. We’ll see how sidetracked I get.” - Allan Kozinn, New York Times

"LEV ZHURBIN, a Russian-born violist who works under the name Ljova, seems to be everywhere lately. He has arranged music for the Kronos Quartet and for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, composed soundtracks for a handful of films and turned up regularly in New York freelance ensembles.

For this debut CD Mr. Zhurbin, who is 27 and lives in New York, has taken a route increasingly favored by both pop and classical musicians: he recorded the music mostly in his home studio and released it on his own label.

Except for an eerily atmospheric cover of Bjork's ''Army of Me'' and an arrangement of a Romanian folk song, the works here are originals. And except for an accordion line in one piece, Mr. Zhurbin does all the playing, multitracking his viola so that throaty melodies are supported by pizzicato rhythms, lush chordal figures and counterpoint.

He is an eclectic, with an ear for texture. In the opening ''Central Park in the Dark'' (no relation to the Ives work), the viola tone is deep and recorded with enough closely focused grittiness to put its songlike melody line in perspective. Modal blues melodies are heard in several works, both directly (in ''Crosstown'' and ''Breadbasket Blues'') and in odd mixtures (with African folk music in ''Plume''). ''Bagel on the Malecon'' borrows Latin rhythms, and Mr. Zhurbin also touches on country music (in ''Coffee & Rum'') and Middle Eastern dance figures (in ''Ori's Fearful Symmetry'').

Still, his best works are more fully in classical styles. ''Collage,'' for one, uses electronic loops to create a Minimalist texture. And if ''Spring Valley Sunset,'' an unadorned solo rhapsody recorded in a field, with bird song and other attendant noises, is sonically the least polished track, it is nevertheless the most strikingly original and soulful." - Allan Kozinn, NEW YORK TIMES

Ljova and the Kontraband play genre-defying music beautifully and soulfully. Organically bringing together influences ranging from classical and new music, klezmer, tango, jazz, Gypsy music and more, their music is smartly original, steeped in tradition while moving those traditions forward. Ljova is also a savvy promoter who continually demonstrates that independent artists can effectively use new models of music distribution and social networking to bring their music to the public on their own terms. - Bill Bragin, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City

richly textured palette featuring Eastern European and Gypsy melodies beautifully offset by Latin-tinged rhythms - New Yorker

"...[Ljova] is an extraordinarily talented and versatile musician, who has an incredible understanding of the intricacies of the imaginative mind." - Yo-Yo Ma, cellist

"I am simply in awe of Lev's talents. He is one of the outstanding exponents of a new generation of musicians that I consider, in a good sense, mutants. Equally at home in a chamber group or symphony orchestra playing the canon of the literature or the most complex modernistic settings, or imaginatively improvising on folk melodies with musicians from around the world, Lev proves that an integration between seemingly different cultures is possible, inevitable, and fruitful. He and the other leaders of his generation are, in my view, the people that will ensure that music remains vital to the minds and hearts of a wide spectrum of people.
As a composer, arranger and violist, Lev reconnects with the tradition of composer-performer-improviser that was the norm in the past and is fortunately coming back. He does all his work at an extraordinary level." - Osvaldo Golijov, composer

..This past January, the Russian-born, New York City-based violist Ljova and his Vjola Contraband drew a full house at Joe's Pub in Manhattan, forcing fans to stand three-deep at the room's swanky, dimly lit bar. Rarely have I seen so many young, attractive people pay to hear a band with no less than two violists not to mention an accordion player, an acoustic bassist, and a percussionist who bears a striking resemblance to Sideshow Bob. Yet there they were in astonishing numbers, knocking back $10 cocktails and whooping it up at the end of every tune.

Ljova, otherwise known as Lev Zhurbin, was born in Moscow in 1978 and emigrated to the States in 1990 with his parents, the composer Alexander Zhurbin and the writer Irena Ginzburg. He graduated from Juilliard and immediately took off in all directions. He has written music for folk, jazz, and classical ensembles; has arranged world-music material for marquee groups such as the Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble; has composed music for film; and, with his fellow composers Ronen Landa and Jonathan Zalben, co-founded Mediant Music, a commercial-music production company that has worked on projects for the likes of Kraft and Coca-Cola.

The music that Ljova performs with his Vjola Contraband is deeply indebted to European folk traditions, though you'd be hard pressed to pinpoint a precise origin. Looking a bit like Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe-phone, the bespectacled 28-year old spoke directly into his instrument's microphone-pickup between tunes. But when he mentioned his "strong bias toward uneven meters," he wasn't just talking. The off-kilter rhythms he favors recall the asymmetrical dance beats of central and southeastern Europe, where time signatures tend to look like hat sizes (7/8, 13/8, 15/16). They tug and pull at you in strange and mysterious ways, as do Ljova's melodies, which have the tuneful, emotive quality of good pop.

Occasionally, he makes direct reference to his source material. One as-yet-unnamed tune was inspired by music Ljova heard in Hungary while traveling with his girlfriend, Inna Barmash, lead singer for the Gypsy-klezmer-funk band Romashka....

Back home, he sought to capture the unique rhythms employed in the Hungarian town of Szek, where the dancers appear to have what he jokingly called "a really organized way of stumbling from side to side." Despite the goofy introduction, the tune itself turned out to be a haunting drone-like lament that made me instantly homesick for my wife and child. Pathetic? Yes. But impressive, too - at least on Ljova's part. Music rarely punches my emotional buttons that way. And it almost never makes me feel anything remotely resembling lonesomeness or longing.

The emotion most often summoned by a Ljova performance, however, is elation. His tunes frequently display the kind of driving punch-drunk intensity that typifies Raymond Scott's music -- especially the "Powerhouse" theme that accompanies all of the assembly-line scenes in those old Warner Bros. cartoons. And Ljova's colleagues take obvious pleasure locking into the tricky grooves and intricate parts evident in so much of the band's repertoire.

Ljova repays the favor with beneficence on the bandstand. Given his own considerable skills, the Vjola Contraband could be just a star vehicle for its leader. But Ljova promotes many compositions by fellow band members. He appears to be equally happy backing a bandmate or creating a scene-stealing solo. On those rare occasions when he does grab the spotlight, his performance displays the same rhythmic and melodic flair as his writing. More typically, however, he simply plays lead on a composition then gracefully steps aside. I especially liked the results on "Tango for Patty," a showpiece for accordionist Patrick Farrell, who occasionally threw in some jazzy dissonance alongside his Eastern-European melodic inflections.

Perhaps Ljova's humility came from years spent playing second fiddle to violinists. Or maybe he already knows something that many musicians - and most people in general - only learn later in life: the more you give, the more you receive. - Alexander Gelfand, JAZZIZ (April 2007)

VOTED one of TOP 10 JEWISH RELEASES of 2006!

After hearing this extraordinary album, you'll never tell another viola joke again. Ljova, a Russian émigré now living in New York, is a superb player and composer, and this set, mostly of originals, ranges in emotion and colors across the globe.

Multitracked alongside accordionist Michael Bregman, Ljova is a virtuosic violist who can make the instrument do just about anything, and the set runs gracefully from the poignant to the jolly. This brilliant debut is available from www.kapustnik.com. - George Robinson, Jewish Week

"An album of solo viola music doesn't usually grab the spotlight. However, this self-released debut recording from 27-year-old Russian-born Lev Zhurbin (aka Ljova), one of New York's fastest-rising composers and instrumentalists, is something special. Using his rich-voiced viola as his multitracked and quick-witted medium, Ljova weaves together diverse elements from around the world to create surprising, yet organic textures in mostly original material (save Björk's "Army of Me" and a traditional Romanian tune). From the honky-tonk drawl of "Coffee & Rum" to the Cuban son of "Bagel on the Malecon" to the Balkan slides of "Middle Village," Ljova continually delights." - Anastasia Tsioulcas, BILLBOARD

Quick, name a violist, any violist! There are plenty of marvelous ensemble players and two or three who live by the handful of oddball concertos, but nobody quite like the polymath Lev Zhurbin, who likes to be known by his diminutive, Ljova.

Though he was born in the string quarry of Russia and refined in the purifying precincts of Juilliard, Zhurbin turned out to be a lover of gritty hybrids. The music he writes and plays is full of Brahmsian tone, Bartók lines, hiccupping Hungarian rhythms, Klezmer soul and the sexy plaintiveness of tango and the blues.

Zhurbin and the group Vjola Contraband played the late set at Joe's Pub on Wednesday, and the crowded, overheated room was the perfect venue for young musicians still scouting out their own creative terrain. The violist, whose pleasantly geeky stage presence contrasted with the swagger of his sound, described traveling around Hungary and Transylvania in search of the perfect folk tune.

Bartók must have been on his mind, since the Hungarian composer was one of the first and most crucial ethnographers of Eastern Europe's rural traditions. But while Bartók scoured the countryside for the voice of his country's people, Zhurbin's spiritual home is really Queens, that living anthology of ethnic music. It's poetic, really, that a master of the middle-voiced instrument should write a soulful piece named for the neighborhood of Middle Village.

Like many of the most interesting and entrepreneurial musicians of his generation (he was born in 1978), Zhurbin is an avid collector of influences, beginning with his father, Alexander Zhurbin, the composer of a Russian rock-opera version of the Orpheus tale.

The band is likewise a purist's nightmare. The Swiss percussionist Mathias Kunzli sat astride a cajón, a beatable box of Peruvian birth, and tapped out rhythms that commuted between Havana and Sarajevo. The accordionist, Patrick Farrell, hails from Cajun country, and his chameleonic instrument now took on the hues of a Buenos Aires bandoneón, now a gypsy squeezebox.

Of course, you don't get good music just by raking together a pile of ethnic traditions and jumping in. What matters is the personality behind the mix and the technique to extract all the various essences. Ljova's command of the viola extends from the quiet melancholy with which he draws out a slow melody to high-speed flaming licks.

In concert, he mocked his own propensity for limping meters, intricate harmonies and moderate tempos. "I always feel like fast music goes too slowly," he said. I know what he means: When beats click by quickly, music can get simplified, like a car speeding boringly along a straight desert road. So, just to prove himself wrong, Zhurbin and the band batted out a dizzying, up-tempo piece with syncopations so insistent and a downbeat so shifty that it felt like it had reversed direction in mid-measure.

If this sounds like music you wish you hadn't missed, there's always his Ljova's new CD: "Vjola: World on Four Strings." - Justin Davidson, NEWSDAY

In an exuberant show that went on for well over their allotted hour onstage, the group blended fiery gypsy dances, rustically melancholy songs without words, intricately and imaginatively arranged jazz and potently crescendoing classical melodies, often in the same song... This concert was exhilarating, transcendent, a blast. - Lucid Culture blog